The One True Church by Richard John Neuhaus

The One True Church

by Richard John Neuhaus

The Public Square

Richard John Neuhaus died on January 8, 2009, at the age of seventy-two—a great loss to the magazine, to American public discourse, and to his many friends.

We present here a previously unpublished essay, "The One True Church," which he wrote in New York during his last months, together with a few of our favorite While We're At It items from the nineteen years of his work in The Public Square.

My church is better than your church. It sounds like the stuff of schoolboy quarrels on the playground: My dad can beat your dad! Yet, sad to say, that is how many Christians have understood recent statements on Catholic ecclesiology. In 2000 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a document called Dominus Iesus and then, in 2007, reiterated its main points in "Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church."

The gist of these is that, with important qualifications related to Eastern Orthodoxy, non-Catholic churches are not to be called "Church" in the proper sense of the term but are better described as "ecclesial communities." This was widely decried by many non-Catholic (and some Catholic) theologians as a departure from, if not reversal of, the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. It was, we were told, a body blow to ecumenism, the quest for visible unity among ­Christians.

I have on occasion offered this proposition: "The Catholic Church is the Church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time." Some of my critics have questioned whether that is adequate. To say that it is the most fully and rightly ordered, they contend, implies or at least invites the inference that other communities are also the Church of Jesus Christ, albeit not so fully and rightly ordered.

To think more fully about this, we need to clarify what the Catholic Church claims for herself and what she does, and does not, acknowledge with respect to other Christian communities. My own thoughts are occasioned by two essays I read recently: one by Avery Cardinal Dulles in a volume called Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition and the other by Christopher J. Molloy, an essay titled "Subsistit In: Nonexclusive Identity or Full Identity?" that appeared in The Thomist.

Before we can get anywhere with this discussion, two stipulations must be firmly in place. The first is that we are not engaged in a rivalry between our side and some other side. Some years ago, when William F. Buckley heard that a prominent Protestant had entered into full communion with the Catholic Church, he exclaimed: "This is great news. It's like the Yankees stealing the star pitcher from the Red Sox." That is an understandable tribal response, but it takes us back to the squabbling of boys on the playground. Questions of great theological moment are at stake. In these matters, Catholic and non-Catholic alike should have as their one concern the question of what Christ intended, and still intends, for his one Church—it being understood by all that, in the deepest meaning of the term, there can finally be only one Church, since the Church is the Body of Christ, of which Christ is the head, and there is only one Christ.

Tribalism has no place in this discussion. As John Paul II reminded Catholics in his 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, being a Catholic is not reason for proprietorial pride but for profound gratitude for a grace received, all undeserved on our part. Moreover, a Catholic who does not earnestly want to recognize and rejoice in the gifts of grace to be found in other Christian communities will almost certainly be more hindrance than help in this discussion.

The second and related stipulation is that we are not comparing an ideal depiction of the state of Catholicism with less flattering depictions of other communities—or vice versa. It is not a matter of what we like or dislike in this community or that. I have decided views on certain Orthodox and Protestant virtues that Catholics might well emulate. As Malloy writes, in reflecting on the uniqueness of the Catholic Church "one can affirm both the essential fullness of the ecclesial reality of the Catholic Church and the concrete poverty and woundedness of her lived life, together with her practical need of the expressive ecclesial riches found outside her visible boundaries." Not only can one affirm both, one must affirm both.

Please continue the article in its entirety at The First Things website.